IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE - Alive Island

This review is the fourth in a Larry Cohen retrospective commissioned by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective can be found here.

Director: Larry Cohen

Writer: Larry Cohen

Cast: Michael Moriarty, Karen Black, Laurene Landon, James Dixon, Gerrit Graham, Macdonald Carey, Neal Israel, Art Lund, Ann Dane

Runtime: 95 mins.

1987

I had held a lit candle of hope that the "It's Alive" movies could be one of the great unheralded horror trilogies. The first impressed me with its psychosocial insights, and the second expanded that scope ambitiously. It's Alive III: Island of the Alive postures at a grander narrative still, yet the end result feels so small in comparison.

The film begins as its best self. A street-level birthing and maiming incident spools out into an intense courtroom scene legislating the fate of the violently defective monster babies. The wonderfully melodramatic scene culminates in a courtroom panic that incites a captive monster baby to escape its confines and menace the Honorable Judge Watson (Macdonald Carey). Bloodshed is only avoided by the intervention of the baby's father, our designated protagonist Stephen Jarvis (Michael Moriarty). This rupturous demonstration of love coupled with the threat of violence convinces the Judge to banish the little creatures to a remote island where they may become... whatever... away from society.

Here the momentum stops dead, fracturing the film into a curious mess. Stephen visits his ex-wife Ellen (Karen Black) who doesn't really want to see him. Stephen visits a sex worker named Sally (Laurene Landon) who doesn't really want to see him either. Stephen goes to a party with the hoi polloi who don't really want to see him but do give him a book deal. The corporate stooges responsible for the birth defects go baby-hunting on the island but get slaughtered. Stephen teams up with some different scientists who also go to the island to get slaughtered. The narrative is a sweater with frayed threads pulling the story to ribbons.

The plot I was expecting the story to hinge on casually kicks in halfway through, then doesn't make it to the final act intact. It's as if quality of concept was eschewed for quantity of concept. Take the creatures, for example. The babies are banished to a remote island to grow older. That's a fun story! It could've been Jurassic Park before Jurassic Park. Yet over the course of its 95 minute runtime, we also learn the following: the big babies are reproducing, the big babies are wanted by the government, the big babies are being exposed to radiation, the big babies can communicate with ESP, the big babies want to hunt down Ellen, and apparently, the big babies have measles. We learn about that last one amidst the climax.

Stephen doesn't do anything to hold the movie together. He's the weakest protagonist of the trilogy, delivering a performance that has little success swinging between extremes of lilting apathy, pitiful desperation, and unhinged sexual harassment. The movie has little idea what to do with him. He even spends about a minute of runtime detained in Cuba, only to cross to Florida on a raft with a couple of swell new Cuban friends who reassure him, "Good luck with your kid. Maybe you won't have to shoot him!"

Once the film conglomerates into a climax through sheer force of contrivance, Cohen returns to the meat and potatoes of the trilogy by sewing everything up with family drama. It doesn't really work, being built upon such slovenly foundation, but it does provide some nice moments like a creature shoving a half dozen cops off a roof, or a bout of parental mania in a stolen car. The film is less than its clanging parts, an unfortunate dud to cap a fun and freaky trilogy.

1.5 / 5  BLOBS